Halloween 2022 is conjuring up the spirit of the spooky tradition. With scary thoughts of the COVID-19 pandemic, Halloween 2022 is inspiring an unusual number of extravagantly decorated houses, and the money being spent on costumes and candy predicts a blow-out Halloween.
The basic theme of Halloween is to be scared, or to scare people, and the annual outbreak of fear over tainted Halloween candy has successfully been used to add an additional, and very real, villain to any Halloween celebration.
In the past, we have been made to fear the real possibility that our children are being targeted by evil-doers who come with the intent to kill or injure children with Halloween candy tainted with poison or razor blades in apples.
In the 80s I remember promoting on my radio show a free service being offered by local hospitals to X-ray children’s candy to make certain it was safe for consumption. The stories of past attempts to poison or injure children were accepted as fact.
In 2022, a new villain has been added to the spooky ambience of Halloween. On August 30, 2022, the Drug Enforcement Agency released a warning to parents about “rainbow fentanyl,” colorful pills carrying the deadly synthetic opioid that has been blamed for countless fatal overdoes in America. Fentanyl is deadly and has shown up on the streets in over half of the states.
Fentanyl is a real threat. However, when pressed by NBC News for specifics on the threat of “rainbow fentanyl,” the DEA “has seen nothing that indicates that the pills will be related to [Halloween] or that drug traffickers are putting it into Halloween candy.
Fact-checking services like Snopes have found no evidence to support parents being concerned about “rainbow fentanyl” in their children’s Halloween candy. But once the original warning of “rainbow fentanyl” on the streets as Halloween approached, it was impossible to cap the fear.
The fear over “rainbow fentanyl” in Halloween candy fits the perennial threat of tainted Halloween candy. But let’s set the record straight: the fear over tainted Halloween candy or razor blades in apples was based on hoaxes - urban myths.
In 2017 - 2018 there were warnings that led to panic that Halloween candy was tainted with Ecstasy, but those stories proved to be nothing more than rebooted stories about marijuana and LSD in Halloween candy.
The truth is - there is no credible evidence showing that on Halloween night there are evil people trying to kill and poison through the distribution of candy.
So how did these stories about tainted Halloween candy originate in the media?
In 1970, 5-year-old Kevin Toston fell into a coma on Halloween and died four days later. The family called police to report that Kevin had eaten Halloween candy laced with heroin. What the police and the media didn’t initially know was that the family had sprinkled heroin on the candy to make it appear as if the young boy had been poisoned by some evil person who was putting heroin in candy.
The truth was that the family was trying to cover up the truth that this 5-year-old boy had gotten into his uncle’s stash of real heroin and consumed it – causing him to fall into a coma and ultimately die. This was a clear case of a family trying to protect themselves from criminal charges by creating the hoax that the Halloween candy was laced with heroin.
In 1974, there was a new national wave of hysteria ignited when 8-year-old Timothy O’Bryan died Halloween night after eating Pixie Sticks he got that night trick-or-treating. The child did die from cyanide in the Pixie Sticks, but that was not the work of an evil stranger out to kill children on Halloween. Ronald O’Brien, Timothy’s father, put the cyanide in the Pixie Sticks hoping to kill his son for the insurance money.
Ronald O’Brien was prosecuted and convicted of murdering his son in May, 1975; and he was executed in March, 1984.
But the media ran with the original story about tainted Halloween candy.
A more modern incident was being reported in Galion, Ohio after a father said his son went trick-or-treating in a neighborhood and started having a seizure. Police confirmed the boy tested positive for meth. That led to police issuing a warning to all parents, but little is known about how the boy was exposed to the meth. Was it tainted candy or an accident?
To a great degree, the media is responsible for reporting stories that appear to be about children dying or being harmed by tainted Halloween candy without knowing anything beyond the early police reports. As documented, the media went with the story of a young boy dying from heroin-laced candy; they did not initially realize that the parents had sprinkled heroin on the candy to protect themselves from criminal prosecution.
In the 70s and 80s, medical centers urged concerned parents to bring their children’s Halloween candy in to be X-rayed free of charge. And many people did haul their kids’ candy to be examined.
In 1982, the Halloween candy scare ramped up in the wake of 7 people dying from Tylenol that had been laced with potassium cyanide. A deranged individual in the Chicago area opened packages of Tylenol and placed the poison-laced pills back in the container and back on the store shelves. Seven unsuspecting consumers ingested the poisonous pills and died.
The secure packaging around all over-the-counter drugs today is the result of the infused Tylenol crisis in 1982. No suspect was ever arrested or convicted for the crime, but the idea that a mad individual would purposely taint medicine sent chills throughout the country and lent credibility to the stories about tainted Halloween candy.
There have been numerous cases where it appeared that people had altered Halloween candy for the purpose of killing or injuring innocent children, but investigations debunked nearly every case. The idea that evil people are using Halloween candy to kill children is not true. There have been a few cases where young people altered candy as a prank and some of the candy was eaten and a few may have gotten sick, but there is no evidence to support the fear that people are trying to kill children on Halloween.
